Another exploit hits the crypto industry with approximately $8.4 million stolen from Moola Markets, a non-custodial liquidity and lending protocol built on the first mobile blockchain Celo.

According to the director of investigation Igor Igamberdiev, the attacker exploited the protocol by using 243,000 CELO tokens deposited since Binance and, in turn, lent 60,000 CELO to the Moola protocol to borrow 1.8 million MOO to use as collateral.

With the remaining CELO, the miner increased the price of the MOO token and used the borrowed MOO token as collateral to borrow more tokens through a number of other DeFi lending protocols.

Using all these strategies, the exploiter pocketed 8.8 million CELO ($6.5 million), 765,000 cEUR ($700,000), 1.8 million MOO ($600,000), and 644,000 cUSD ($600,000).

Currently, Moola Markets has stopped all trading on its platform due to the latest exploit. And according to a to update On its Twitter page, the platform advises users not to trade mTokens as the team is actively investigating the exploit.

“We are actively investigating an incident at @Moola_Market. All activity on Moola has been paused. Do not trade mTokens,” Moola Markets said in its Twitter update.

The team added that they have contacted law enforcement and have taken steps to make it difficult for the exploiter to liquidate the funds. And furthermore, they are ready to negotiate a reward payment in exchange for the attacker to return the funds within the next 24 hours.

This month has been a month of exploitation like never seen in the industry. according to new data From Chainanalysis, 2022 is very likely to overtake 2021 in terms of the biggest hacking year on record.

Last week, the trading and lending platform Mango Markets was hit by a $100 million exploit. As reported by Blockchain.News, the attacker manipulated the price of Mango Market’s native MANGO token through a oracle.

Image Source: Shutterstock